Stuff You Should Know - Can oceans power the world?

Episode Date: January 20, 2011

Oceans cover more than 70 percent of Earth's surface. But could the kinetic power of the tides or the oceans' thermal energy become the world's future power source? Listen in as Josh and Chuck break it down. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner, the residue-free, fast drying solution, especially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like stone, tile, laminate, vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff, stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging?

They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuckers Bryant. That makes this Stuff You Should Know. And the heavy index finger of Matt Frederick.

Yeah. Did you hear that? Oh, yeah. It was like an anvil coming down on something. Nobody pushes record like Mattie. One of my friends has finger tips. Just finger tips that look very much like big toes all across. And his big, huge finger tips is what you would do. So like the finger is just narrow and then it balloons up at the end? Really? Yeah. Wow. Freakishly so. He'd be a good bass player, I would think. Maybe so. I'll ask him. You should do that. Chuck, do you remember we have talked about capturing energy, right? Because energy can either be created nor destroyed. It can only be captured. Yeah, we talked about several ways to do this. Yes. Well, one of the ways we talked

about was by putting basically what amount to wind turbines under water. And there was a... Did we talk about that already? We did under water turbines. Oh, yeah, yeah. Sure. We did, right? I think so. It's hard to tell these days. Well, if we didn't, that's good. Because we're going to cover that again in this podcast. I think we did because we talked about verdant technology. Did we? And they were the ones who put some in the Hudson. Didn't we? East River, yeah, sure. Okay. So they put some in in 2006. So it's a wide acclaim. This is a huge project. They were going to just power large parts of New York with this technology. And they went back to check on them. And they found that all but two of their wind turbines were just completely

in shambles. Yeah. It's one of the great challenges in underwater energy production. Bingo. I have updates on them. We'll get to that later, though. Okay. Luckily for us, right? Because the ocean and, well, bodies of water are this huge untapped resource, well, mostly untapped resource of energy. Yeah. There are other ways to capture energy from the ocean, right? Which is what we're going to talk about today. Let's do it. And let's start with the French because apparently they've long known. They're all over it. Yeah. We, like, all of the major innovations that we're pursuing right now came from the French over the last couple centuries, right? Who knew? Yeah. Well, we should just mention the history in 1799,

a long time ago, a Frenchie and his son who I could not find their names. I couldn't either, but they had a pretty cool idea. They attached a big lever to the side of their boat. And when the ocean moved up and down, the lever moved up and down, which could potentially power pumps and saws and things like that. Right. And that's capturing the mechanical energy of wave motion. Yeah. Makes very good sense. But unfortunately, well, or maybe fortunately, the steam engine came along. Right. Kind of rendered that. Unfortunately for him, his idea was rendered moot. But thanks to the rest of us, because steam energy turned out to be a pretty cool thing, the steam engine did. Yes. About a hundred years after that, another Frenchman used heat energy from the ocean

to generate power, but it was not very cost effective. So that died as well. Yes. And then in 1966, there was finally some success once again in France. In Britain. Yeah. And on the Ross River. Yeah. And it still operates today and is actually, for what I can tell, the biggest success. Right. That's yeah. And it's because it's actually generating electricity. Quite a bit. 240 megawatts, which is about, that's better than a wind farm. And that's, yeah. That's typical. Not quite as good as a coal fire power plant, but it is better than a typical wind farm. And it is far and away. I think the most successful ocean energy outfit running right now. Right. Yeah. Well, that's on a river though. Is it a tidal river? A tidal river. Yes. So it's

capturing the energy of the tide. There's also, you can, you can capture the energy of the heat differential. Right. Yeah. And you can capture the mechanical energy. Right. With waves. There's three waves. Three, at least. Yeah. Exactly. Right. Because there's also the currents, underwater turbines. It's four. I mean, the ocean is just lousy with ways to capture energy. Right. It's awesome. Let's talk about waves. This one's my favorite because there's so much to it. Right. There's mechanical energy that can be captured, kinetic energy that can be converted into useful mechanical energy. Basically what you do is you want to somehow power a turbine or a piston to create electricity from a generator. Right. Yeah. And waves move thanks to the wind,

create big crest and troughs. And at one point someone looked at those and said, hey, that's pretty consistent. I bet we could capture that. Right. It is very consistent, is very predictable. Right. Oh yeah. Waves are found all over the place. So they actually can bring energy from other parts of the globe to you, to you, top of the muffin to you. And let's talk about how a wave comes up. Did you read this? No, because you're the expert. You're the wave expert. All right. So waves are the result of a transfer of solar energy to the water, to the oceans. Okay. Okay. So did you know that wind is really just a creation of solar energy, solar radiation, solar heat? And that ends up driving the wave?

Yes, but it's interesting how it. Oh yeah. No, I know. Sure. Okay. All right. It starts with the sun. It does. It does start with the sun, Chuck. Thanks for that segue. Okay. The sun does not heat the earth evenly, right? Right. So there's different pockets of air, surface air that are heated more quickly than others. Okay. They rise. Yeah. Okay. And as they rise, the colder air rushes in, and the movement of the colder air to fill in the space left by the warmer air, that's wind. Okay. That's wind. That's awesome. Okay. So when this water, when the ocean is pushed by wind enough, long enough, hard enough, fast enough for far enough distances, waves pick up, right? Right. And that gives even more traction to the wind,

so the waves just get bigger and bigger. That's why a good storm will produce bigger waves. Right. But what you have is kinetic energy pushing the water into waves. Yeah. And that kinetic energy becomes stored in the wave, right? Right. So the wave is in a bunch of moving water. The water actually, as this kinetic energy rolls over, it acts as a conveyor belt. Right. So it moves in a circular motion and delivers this big, dense amount of kinetic energy to you to capture if you have a wave converter handy. Exactly. Dude, very nice explanation. Was it? Yeah. Thanks, man. I think so. It's been a little while since I got one right. Shall we talk about tides now? Yes. Much to the chagrin of Bill O'Reilly, we do know what

causes tides. I'm glad you mentioned that. Did you see that? Yeah. Bill O'Reilly didn't know that the pull of the moon, the gravitational force of the moon, is what creates tides. He didn't realize it. What's crazy is that the atheist was like, well, we don't know, but still. I know. He was a little flustered. I can understand. He was flustered, but I'm sure. He had a real opportunity to be like, everybody that saw that was on the edge of their seat saying, say it, the moon. And the guy was like, yeah, well, unfortunately, no, and stepped in there to correct him. Right. I haven't heard a response from him either. I'm curious. Who, Bill O'Reilly? Yeah. I don't think he's going to come out and address it at this point. He already looked dumb

enough. He didn't care. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds a month. Yeah. And they can do that without any drugs on the table without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil acid.

Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. On the podcast, pay dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co stars, friends and non stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friends vapor because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so for those of you who don't know what you're talking about quickly, Bill O'Reilly was interviewing the head of the atheists of America and said he explains God by the fact that no one can explain what causes tides. If tides go out, tides come in every day. And we can't explain it.

And no one knows why. I think is what he said. So anyway, it is in fact caused by the gravitational pull of the moon, Mr. O'Reilly. And the cool thing about tides is they're everywhere along the coast. They all coastal areas experience two high tides and two low tides every day. Yeah. And they're pretty much on the button. The unfortunate thing is there's only about 40 places around the earth where you can generate electricity from this because the difference between high and low tide has to be at least 16 feet. And that doesn't happen everywhere. So there's like 40 sites around the world that are suitable. 40 sites in the Bay of Fundy. I don't think we mentioned yet. That is where they're actually

doing this. And it's a great place. Yeah. It's a narrow inlet and it has the highest tides in the world, 50 feet in a very short cycle. So in six hours, they can produce 110 billion tons of seawater flow in and out. Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah, it is. So that's why you were me. Yeah. And they're actually generating power there at Fundy. But what's crazy is that when we talked about in Bretagne, France, 240 megawatts, the Bay of Fundy with that enormous transfer of seawater in and out still only generates a 20 megawatt power, 20 megawatts of power, a 20 megawatt power, just one. So one way they can do this, Josh, is with like rivers with a dam. Right. They can build a tidal dam, essentially. And it operates kind of in the same way.

Which is how, buddy? Oh, I didn't know if we need to explain that. Gates open up. It's called a barrage or is it a barrage or barrage? Barrage. And the tides, when there's an adequate difference in the level of water on the opposite side of the dam, the gate opens and allows water to flow in across the turbine, spins the turbine, creates electricity via generator. Right. So anytime you're talking about wave action or the movement of water, there's going to be some sort of turbine or piston involved. Yeah. Because that's all you need. You just need something. And it's going to generate electricity. That's so awesome.

It is. It still blows me away that that's possible. Yeah. But it's so simple, too. Yeah. We just have to figure out how to do it more efficiently. And then, you know, we'll be able to come up with this nice grab bag of energy providers. That's right. Yeah. Ocean tides, Josh, into tidal currents is another way. Yeah. What are tidal currents? Well, tidal currents are what bring in the tides or the currents that are created by the tides coming in and out, right? Yeah.

The problem with the tidal currents is that they're not constant. Like you said, they happen twice a day in and out each twice a day, right? Yeah. Too high, too low. So you got four tidal currents if you're set up to generate power as it's going in and out. Well, how would you do that, though? Underwater turbines. It's basically like a underwater wind farm. Yeah. I didn't realize that. Like 66-foot propellers underwater spinning. But that's what they put. Was it the East River? That's what they put in New York. They had these in there. Still do.

Yeah. Well, at least two. Well, more than that, we'll get to that. Okay. It's paying off, finally. So, Chuck, that's electrical. As we said, electrical, there's going to be some sort of turbine or piston that is moved up and down by the movement of water, whether it's waves, currents, tides, whatever. But then there's also thermal energy, right? Big time. You want the stat? Yeah. The ocean, the sun provides the equivalent of 250 billion barrels of oil per day in the ocean. Yeah. That's a lot. Yeah.

That's a lot more than we use. The ocean sits out there and collects all this heat from the ocean. I think in the U.S., we use 21 million barrels of oil a day. And this is 250 billion. Yeah. Now, the problem is, that's across the entire ocean. That's across 70% of the Earth's surface. Well, yeah, sure. We don't know how to do that. We're still working with full of itaic cells. Like, how does this work? How do we make this happen? So, that's as much as we could ever possibly capture, right?

But still, even if we get a significant portion of that and can convert it into energy, we're on easy street. Otec. Explain. Otec is ocean thermal energy conversion, right? Yeah, that's how they do it. And there's a couple of ways to do it. There's a closed system. There's an open system, and there's a hybrid system, which is open and closed system mixed together. Yeah. So, with a closed system, usually you take some sort of low boiling point liquid, like ammonia, which has a boiling point of, like, negative 28 degrees.

Yeah, Fahrenheit. Right. Which, I don't understand how Windex works then. That's something I think we need to look up. How Windex works? Yeah. Has ammonia in it, right? How is it kept liquid? I don't know. Because I can tell you the area under my sink is warmer than negative 28 degrees Fahrenheit. Yeah. I mean, but there's bottles of ammonia, too, just plain ammonia. Right. I guess Bill O'Reilly was right, Chuck.

So, in a closed system, you take ammonia, you expose it to seawater, warmer seawater, right? And it immediately vaporizes into gas. Yeah. As that gas expands, it pushes a turbine. There's another turbine, right? Yeah, just like a steam engine would. Powers a generator, and then the gas is moved into another chamber where it encounters cold seawater and converts back into liquid and is pumped back into the original chamber again. See, I love systems like this, where it's just a loop. Yeah.

Stuff becomes vapor, then it goes back to what it was, then it becomes vapor again. Right. It seems real efficient. Closed system, right? Yes. Yes. And then there's the open system, right? Yeah, and that's a little bit of a different principle. It's warm surface water, but these are vacuum chamber. They remove all the air, and because of magic, when you do this, the seawater

boils. Is that insane clown posse? I think so. So it actually boils, and that produces steam, like pure water steam, and then that can drive the turbine, and then just like with the ammonia, you pump cold seawater back in, cools the steam, changes it back into water. Right. And back again. Back again. The cool part about this is they can create fresh water as sort of a byproduct, which is awesome.

That's huge. Yeah, desalination is, they've had a lot of trouble doing that successfully in a large scale, right? Right. We talked about that in manufacturing water and some of the other ones. But yeah, if you create the steam out of seawater, they found that it's almost pure water, pure fresh water, no salt, and you can drink that. So yeah, they're trying to figure out how to use open cycle systems and the hybrid system, which like I said, combines closed and open systems.

But both the hybrid and the open create fresh water. And I think they figured out that a single two megawatt Otec plant, either open or hybrid, can produce 4,300 cubic meters of desalinated water every day. Wow. Which is that I can't drink that much. That's a lot. Yeah. You can drink that much coffee.

I do, which is why I spill it. Right now, unfortunately, Otec systems aren't producing a lot of electricity, but they think that the potential there is pretty great. So people are investing in that at this point. Yeah, that seems to be the one that's attracting the most investment dollars right now. Yeah. I wonder why. What do you mean? Why people are going that way?

Yeah. I don't know. Maybe it's the most efficient cost-effective way at this point. Who knows? I think it's actually the most expensive to tell you the truth. Oh, really? Yeah. I mean, it's not the most efficient.

It may be. That's true. But it's the most expensive, I think. Well, right now, what's going on is there's a lot of research and development happening in all these fields because they think the ocean is really where it's at. We talked about verdant power. Here's a little update on their system. They are in phase three right now.

Like you said, they have some problems in the demonstration phase because marine environments are pretty rough on everything. Just ask anyone who lives on the beach with a car. Some fish is like, I'm swimming here. That's true. Oh, we'll get to that. It is controversial. We talked about it before.

But yeah, that's true. In the demonstration period, though, they did produce a free flow system. They produced, they called it excellent hydrodynamic mechanical and electrical performance. Grid connected power with no quality problems. Fully bi-directional, continuous, unattended operation. So they don't even have some dude down there. Right. I don't know how much that job would pay.

Yeah, exactly. In the end, they produced 70 megawatt hours of energy to two end users. And right now, they applied for a permit basically in just a couple of months or last month in December. They applied for a permit to make it real. And they're waiting on. All of that was just fiction. They just wrote that story down.

They're like, now let's make this real. Investors? Right. Well, they want to do it, you know, in earnest and not just demonstrate. And they think they're at that point now. So they're waiting on, I think right now they're waiting on New York City to say, take over the East River or this portion of it and do it. So two megawatts?

70 megawatt hours of energy. To two families. To two end users. I don't think they were families. I think they were probably power plants or something. Oh, oh, gotcha. Yeah. Are you sure?

No, I'm not. Because end user could also be like some guy with a hot plate. He's like, hey, my hot plate's working just fine. True. The UK is who's leading tidal turbine research right now though. So hats off to you. Is it the UK? I thought Portugal has something.

Well, no, they're all dabbling in it. Spain and Portugal, but the UK is currently ahead of the game in this kind of stuff so far. Wow. Well, yeah, hats off for sure. And yeah, they took the mantle from the French and ran with it, right? The French are like, convoc. It's two accents for me to zero for you today. I know.

That's a switch. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed.

They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, hey dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

So why is this good? Why are we doing this? What are the environmental advantages? Well, one of the things we said was with wave energy, right? I didn't give you a stat. It's going to blow your mind. Let's hear it. Wave energy alone, right?

The kinetic energy found in the motion on the ocean, right? 0.02% of that, right? Could power the entire planet. 0.02. I'm sorry, 0.2% of the energy in ocean waves could power the entire... Still, that's pretty impressive. Yeah, yeah. 0.2.

Not to point anything, 0.2. So what you're saying is we just need to be able to harness a very tiny percentage. Yes, plus also the good thing about waves, which is why I throw my weight behind it, is compared to a wind farm, right? You've got three times the density, right? Oh yeah. So conceivably, moving at about the same rate as wind, five knots or something like that, you would have three times the amount of energy capable of being captured and transferred into

usable electricity. Yeah, it says a current, a water current, ocean current, running five miles an hour can turn a tidal turbine 30 revolutions per minute. And that is very much more than the wind. Well, just and don't forget, I mean, we're talking about turbines that are propellers that are 60 feet across each. I mean, that's a lot. Yes.

30 times a minute, it's like almost once every few seconds. They also run silent and run deep. So a lot of people complain about the noise of wind farms, the buzzing, the buzzing, the constant buzzing, the aerodynamic noise, and they're underwater, so you don't see it as much. But the funny thing is, that's such a human-centric way of looking at it. Like, oh, it doesn't make any noise, because we're above water. Right. Who cares about what it sounds like below water?

Surely placing these things in the ocean are going to have a huge impact, right? Well, and that's the downside, might as well get to that. You can't just throw these things in the ocean and have no impact on marine life. Yeah. It's going to kill some fish. Definitely. Disrupt some spawning patterns. We'll take like an Otec system, right, a closed Otec system.

If, say, it's battered about by a particularly bad typhoon, that closed system may not be closed any longer, and you've got a massive ammonia spill in a local area in the ocean, and yeah, that's going to kill some fish. Yeah. Right? Same with any grease that you might need to keep up piston moving properly. Sure. There's just a lot of factors involved.

But conceivably, I'm pretty sure you could do a, what are those called, that risk assessment people do like a cost-benefit analysis versus say something like a power plant is spewing out. Right. Right? How much, couldn't you compare that pretty easily? Yeah, I think so. And I wonder if the impact would be much less severe on an ocean environment than above ground. Well, there's going to be an impact.

You can't create electricity without some sort of impact on something in the environment. It's like making an omelet. So, exactly. Got to break a few eggs. So, I think the ideal is to find the minimal impact with a maximum payoff. Right now, it is not ocean power because it's still heavily in the R&D phase, which means it's expensive. But as the kinks get worked out, like the solar panels were, I mean, they're still expensive,

but they were way more expensive 20 years ago because they didn't work right all the time. And you had to put more money into making them work right. But once you get the kinks worked out, it becomes a little more efficient, a little cheaper. So, maybe it'll close that gap a bit. Yeah. Yeah, my money, and I think we should talk about why tidal dams, barrages, don't are problematic. Why was the problem? Because it kind of captured my attention.

Like, I was thinking, well, yeah, it spilled some hydroelectric dams at these 40 sites, and that'll help tremendously. Sure. Part of the problem is the whole point of tidal movement in a bay or one of the benefits of it is to filter out impurities, silt, crud, dead crayfish, all that stuff, sucked out and turned into food or filtered into the rest of the ocean. Right? If you have a dam there that's making that more difficult or preventing that, in some cases,

the local environment around that bay suffers because the water purity plummets. Yeah. My money's on wave converter, wave energy converters like Salter's Duck. Plus, we found out that dams on the earth can potentially cause earthquakes. Yeah. I mean, I wonder if it could have an effect under the seafloor as well. Yeah. Learn the hard way sometimes. We definitely do.

Actually, that's the only way humans learn Chuck. The hard way? Yeah. Okay, agreed. Well, if you want to learn more about Salter's Duck, this mysterious thing I've just now mentioned, I would recommend you type that in, s-a-l-t-e-r-a-postrophe-s in the handy search bar at HowStuffWorks.com. Also, a required reading for this one is wave energy, type that in, and ocean power.

That'll just bring up everything right there. Read those three and listen to this podcast and just start spewing out information whenever somebody's like, I love oil. Yeah? For coal. Yeah. You know what we need to do a show on is mountaintop removal coal mining. Have you heard of that?

Yeah, that's tough stuff. Yeah. That makes releasing lubricants into the ocean through an O-tech system look like nothing. Exactly. Yeah. All right. Well, yeah, I said handy search bar already, right? Listen to our mail.

Josh, I'm going to call this one of a hundred or more ocular migraine emails. I would say at least a hundred. We've heard from a lot of people who suffer from these and we can't read them all. We're good now. We've got the idea, right? I want to say to everyone that I'm sorry you have to deal with this stuff, but I picked out one from David in the UK because I like a UK. Did that, you all have a funny accent to it?

It did. Hey guys, just listen to the Migraine podcast. I'm responding to your call. I was first diagnosed with migraines at 14. I'm now 47. When I had an extreme form of dizziness at 14, it made me nauseous, preventing me from standing because the room was spinning, preventing my eyes from remaining still. If I looked to the right, it jittered.

I've not had a particular episode like this since, but the migraine symptoms have changed over the years. Up to the early 20s, I would get tunnel vision. I could only see what I was directly looking at, about 15% of my vision. The rest was all swirly. Imagine looking through a scene through two highly polished steel tubes. From then on, it was the opposite. The subject I was looking at would disappear, but the outer part was clear.

Imagine looking at someone 20 feet away, but look directly at their face. Their head disappeared. The peculiar thing, I think that's peculiar or not. The peculiar thing is that it didn't look odd until I thought about it, somewhat like a blind spot test. Yeah, blind spots are very common of migraines, right? I think so. Well, sure, they're just...

There's a very mild headache following an episode similar to eye strain, and sometimes a feeling which I can only describe as an empty space in my head that feels as though it should have a sign saying, headache to be erected here soon. That's not a good sign. That's not a good sign. Touch wood, guys. I have not had an episode in waking hours for about four years now, and notice no more morning symptoms, which I attribute to being on permanent

statin medication for high cholesterol. Well, you know, here in America, we don't touch wood. We knock it. So that's from David in the UK, and for everyone suffering from ocular migraines, I'm sorry. Yes, same here. Same here. It sounds awful.

He talked about his eyes when he looked to the right, his eyes trembling back and forth. Yeah. Do you remember that actor whose eyes looked them back and forth all the time? He was in, what's the one with John Cusack where there's a murderer, John Cusack, Ray Leota? Say anything? No. Oh, the hotel thing? Yeah.

Yeah, that was awful. What was the name of the movie, though? Oh, I can't remember. Well, he played the guy, like the bad guy in that one, right? But he was also in a movie with Mickey Rourke. And his eyes twitchy? Yeah. That's just like what the actor was known for.

Like they just move back and forth in a really weird way. So if you can tell me what movie that that guy appeared with, with Mickey Rourke, right? Yeah. I want to hear it. Oh, OK. Right? I think we should, oh, we can't do contests anymore, can we? You know, actors always list, have you ever seen a headshot?

They always list on the back their special things they can do. Yeah, this guy's always like, horseback riding, burp on command, accents. And this guy had eye twitch. Right. It's crazy. I can't believe you haven't seen it. I probably have. I just didn't notice it or something.

Well, if you could tell me what movie he was in with Mickey Rourke, I want to hear it. Wrap it up in an email and send it to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The HowStuffWorks iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on iTunes. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

When my daughter ran off to hop trains, I was terrified I'd never see her again. So I followed her into the train yard. This is what it sounds like inside the box car. And into the city of the rails. There I found a surprising world so brutal and beautiful that it changed me. But the rails do that to everyone. There is another world out there and if you want to play with the devil, you're going to find them there in the rail yard. I'm Denelle Morton. Come with me to find out what waits for us in the city of the rails.

Listen to City of the Rails on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts, or cityoftherails.com.